“We still have much to learn about and learn from Enron’s remarkable history to understand its meaning for twenty-first-century American capitalism.”

 —Malcolm S. Salter, emeritus professor, Harvard Business School; author of Innovation Corrupted: The Origins and Legacy of Enron’s Collapse (2008)

This week, Scrivener Publishing and John Wiley & Sons begin shipments of a book that I have been working on for many years, along with my research assistant/editor Roger Donway. We searched and searched for this or that. We debated paragraphs, sentences, even words. And we never cut a corner for what is easily, between the two of us and copy-editor Evelyn Pyle, a 10,000-hour book. [1]

Enron Ascending: The Forgotten Years, 1984–1996 is Book 3 in my tetralogy on Political Capitalism inspired by the rise and fall of Enron.…

[Note: This will be Niskanen Week with forthcoming posts on his views on climate-change science, economics, and public policy. This is particularly relevant with the contradictory policies of the Niskanen Center under its founder and head, Jerry Taylor.]

“Beyond rent-seeking, a corporation can engage in other behaviors long decried by classical liberals, behaviors that might be characterized as contra-capitalism.”

Cronyism … Rent-seeking … Regulatory capture … Special-interest politics … Strategic uses of government intervention … Many terms have described business lobbying within the up-for-grabs socioeconomic system of political capitalism where the political means replaces the economic means. [1] It results in what classical-liberal entrepreneur Charles Koch calls bad profit. [2]

But beyond rent-seeking, a corporation can engage in other behaviors long decried by classical liberals, behaviors that might be characterized as contra-capitalism. Importantly, the corporation might not recognize these behaviors as an explicit strategy (Enron did not; Tesla does not). These separable behaviors are complementary.  And now, with a term, what was implicit can become explicit for the public policy and corporate-governance debate.…

“R Street continues to live the lie of ‘engag[ing] in policy research and outreach to promote free markets and limited, effective government.’ Pricing carbon dioxide, replete with global tariffs (‘border adjustments’) and tax differentials (‘equity adjustments’), coupled with a government-forced transformation to (not so) ‘clean’ political energies, has nothing to do with classical liberalism, energy freedom, free markets, or limited-and-effective government.”

It had to happen.

With its Left Progressive donors, R Street Institute was going to march down the statist road as one initiative got replaced with another.

Founded in 2012 with climate-alarmist/Left money, R Street tried to shed into new free-market skin by pitching a seemingly soft proposal to substitute new/better government intervention for worse/existing intervention. Specifically, replace existing climate regulation with carbon-dioxide (CO2) tax-and-dividend. That was during the Obama era, assumed to turn into the Hillary era.…